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Linux Is Cheaper
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running a story on what a lot of us already know: Linux IS cheaper than Windows. This not because it is free. It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts."
I have no doubt that Linux is cheaper in a lot of situations, but I am also sure that Windows, or indeed any other OS, is cheaper for some things.
There can be no one perfect solution.
That other Slashdot story that told us what a lot of us already know: Windows IS cheaper than Linux was clearly hokum. This'll finally shut those monkeys up.
Oh wait, the second sentence is Most analysts, if asked whether Linux has a lower TCO than other systems, will answer, "It depends."
Glad they wrote a whole article about it.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
How much more beating can this dead horse take? I feel like I'm watching Gilligan's Island.
"Derp de derp."
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts.
Th-they skirt over this point a bit too quickly. The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
After all, how many great sysadmins spent years pouring over 'How to be a Linux admin' books, struggling to get their 'LCE' (Linux Certified Engineer) certificates? None. Unh. Yet that's exactly how Microsoft admins are raised.
Linux admins (and originally users) are experimenters.. that's why they're not on the MS platform. Experimenters make good sysadmins, because they learn by themselves, learn clever admin tricks through experience, and, er, don't just rely on a bit of paper that says 'I'm a good sysadmin.'
I'd be a bit weary about the point that Solaris admins can 'learn Linux' (ohh, unh) within a few weeks though. People from stricter UNIX disciplines think Linux is some, er, easy-to-learn UNIX renegade. (unh, unh) It ain't true folks, it's like deep and stuff.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Sure linux is cheaper if you're running five hundred servers, but where I used to work, we had only five servers, easily handeled by one admin
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Its i18n, l10n, p12n, and c11n! I can have linux in any language I want without having to buy my operating sytem in a country that uses that language. Its translated in to many more languages too, around 90 are avalible for kde alone!. nynorsk was avalible for years before Micrsoft supported it!
Its still a bit rough (it could do with support for non gregorian calanders for example) but its proof that linux is for everyone everywhere!
The real merits is not because it is free, but because it gives you a choice and control!
C'mon, folks. It's simple:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
include the cost of working out the TCO?
In the short-run, this can sometimes hurt a business, because the DIY crowd often like to build it themselves rather than buy it. But in the long-term (and with proper management), having a crowd of DIY people will save you a bundle. While the windows support staff are stuck trying to install MS-Word, the linux folks are fixing router problems, patching security holes and tuning your intranets.
Sex - Find It
In the article, they talk about how a typical Windows admin can handle 10-15 boxes (sounds reasonable). But then they quote somebody who says his Linux/BSD/Solaris admins can handle 1,000 boxes. A thousands? This seems like an incredibly high number. Can anyone out there back this up? Can you guys really admin a *thousand* servers? Pointers would be welcome on how this is done...is it all perl/shell scripting?
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
I have a linux web/mail server running for a local non-profit organization of which the exectutive director is a friend of the family. Their website is very small, and doesn't need to be updated often. It gets about 100 hits a month. :) If they need the page to be updated, they send me the new text, and I update it via SSH.
I have had that server running for over 5 months now, and I haven't needed to physically visit the server in 4 months. That was because of a power outage; not even Linux is more powerful than God
The point I'm trying to make here is that this nonprofit has no IT department, no sysadmins. They are mainly 50 year old ladies who are smart enough to not ask what the difference between RAM and hard drives. They have a low cost webserver running, which is freeloading on a broadband connection they already have. They don't touch the server, which lies in the corner of an empty supply closet.
Let's see... The article states that Linux/Unix admins USUALLY do cost more, but now they don't due to the tech slump. In other words, the TCO is lower because of all the out of work admins drove down salaries. Therefore, more sophisticated Linux/Unix admins are getting screwed.
Now answer the question, "Aren't you happy to hear Linux is now cheaper?"
You can't compare Linux TCO with Windows TCO, because Windows doesn't have one. You don't own anything with windows. Windows TCO is a myth and should be called Windows TCL - Total Cost of licenseship.
"Summary Ley you can under wine with success... and they are porting it!"
We're months away from having the screamernet version (i.e. render only, you still need a Windows machine to set up the animation/modelling etc) and probably at least a year or two away from a Linux version.
Which is fine. If Linux is a good OS that'll run Lightwave a year or two from now then I'll be happy to evaluate it.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Linux is worthless, I'm saying that this zealousy over it won't solve anybody's problems. As a matter of fact, it'll probably cause problems. Most of my company frequents Slashdot. Let's say they were taken in by the hype and adopted Linux. Guess what? Expectations are high, which means that every little problem will be blown out of proportion. Before you know it, everybody's anti-Linux.
We're already having that happen today. Some of the engineers have been moved to Linux, and they're fussing over every idiotic problem that Windows just doesn't have. The worst part is having to look up badly spelt commands in order to figure out what to do. They're having to make compromises in order to get through their day.
If this happens on a grand scale, then what? You get the bigwigs around companies everywhere saying "What a nightmare. I'll stick with the company that understands our needs best."
Slashdot'd be smart to pull back on these worthless debates. Raise the bar too high and Linux'll never be accepted.
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive,
I've said this before but, while the above statement is frequently bandied about, I do not see evidence of this in the real world. Indeed the majority of job postings that I see for Linux sysadmins offer salaries that are a fair bit less than similar positions looking for MCSEs.
Indeed, there are also several commonly used salary surveys on the net that seem to indicate that Linux sysadmins are paid less than their Windows counterparts. I've even seen a few stupid cases where positions requiring Linux experence and an MCSE certification actually paid less than similar positions requiring an MCSE only.
Is this only the case in my region or is it the case on a wider scale?
and i'm sure that if you compared windows to linux, with one admin, with equal skills in their area of expertise, it would be a different story. This could be justa lot of fluff that /.'er love, but it could be true. I'm not saying it is, but what I am saying is this articlue probably took in mind the typical windows *idiot* admin. I've worked with many in my time.
...last stat I heard was one MS admin for every 15 boxes and one Mac admin for every 150 ~ 300 boxes. It's called TCO, and one of the reasons a Mercedes can be less expensive over the vehicle's lifetime.
NTFS, while rather robust in its overall operation, CANNOT handle more than one improper shutdown without requiring massive amounts of repair and/or formatting
Really? That's funny... 'cause my computer, for some reason, won't shut down properly - I have to just yank the plug. I've done it dozens of times, and guess what - NTFS is just fine, no problems.
Lets not go making stuff up, eh?
What does Lightwave have to do with anything? If you're using it to prove a point that not everything runs under Linux, you're correct. Most "consumer" or "small studio" apps such as Lightwave do not run on Linux. However, there are viable alternatives that sometimes (oftentimes) end up being better, more powerful, or beneficial in other ways. To counter your "Lightwave", there's Maya. Maya runs under Linux. A number of large animation houses use a Maya-Linux combination to keep costs down and increase productivity. Let's face it. Something that allows you to exit the GUI and render from the command line is a VERY good thing in terms of squeezing out as much out of your systems as you can.
As the article said, Linux keeps costs down as far as staffing goes. Instead of having 4 people on staff for Windows, 4 people for Mac, and 4 for Linux, you can pretty much fire the Mac and Windows admins, because Linux admins tend to be multiple-platform aware, so you get more for your money--even if you have to pay them more.
In addition to that, Linux is the most open and accessable platform. If something needs to be done on that platform, it pretty much can be done for free or implemented using an OSS solution, whereas with Windows you'll be required to either develop the resources in-house or purchase additional software/development services.
Yes, it's still a choice which one you want to run. But unlike Windows, it doesn't cost you anything to throw a copy of Linux onto your machine and dual-boot. There's no reason why you can't have a copy of Linux on the workstation of every person who might use it--you might even find that the copies of Windows go unused as Linux has come a LONG way in the past couple of years in terms of usability, compatibility, etc. You don't need to be a geek anymore--Windows often requires far more geekiness than Linux.
-Sara
If it ain't broke, don't fix it - according to the article.
And that is the problem with Windows. By the time i had gotten most of my servers to NT4, they were shoving Win2k down my throat. After i had gotten everyone onto Windows NT 4.0 workstation, i couldn't get it any more - i was forced to have W2k and NT4 Wkstn running side by side.
Windows, unless you just refuse to be able to run certain software, requires you to change everything every 2 years. Its a nightmare.
Mac OS X and FreeBSD wouldn't have required me to change so much stuff over the last two, years, and i don't see a big deal with the next few either.. while windows admins will HAVE to incorporate XP into the networks, because they will have no choice.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
TCO means total, which includes down time, admin time, install time, admin/user training time, related hardware needed to deploy and licenses.
Not to mention books, travel to conferences, meetings to obtain buy-in, aspirin, caffine and therapy.
A President of linux consultancy says that linux admins can handle more boxes than a windows admin.
This study is stupid. As a rule, there are more windows admins than anything else, because that is what the market demands. As a result, there are more $30-40k deserving windows admins who would get their hands full with a lot of boxes. Still, if you need admins for a 100,000 hit a day web site (which doesn't sound all that high to me), you need to hire people who can roll out identical, customized machines in short time, have experience monitoring, and can batch updates, etc. You can hire a bunch of cheaper admins, who will install hotfixes one at a time, rebooting each time, or you can hire one or two good admins who can qchain em together, and reboot when all are installed. TCO is as much a function of management and hr's hiring skill as it is or anything else.
ostiguy
If your company tried Linux on the basis of hype, it probably means they initially got hooked on MS hype too. I doubt either decision was made objectively or wisely. Did it occur to your Slashbot bosses that maybe they should have only tried Linux out on a few machines first? That way it needn't have caused any significant pain. Also, a newly deployed Windows system isn't that hot either. You're co-workers are comparing something that's probably had months or years of bug-fixes, tweaking, and workarounds to something they just adopted. NEWSFLASH! Everything sucks just in different ways. Like any tool, Linux can do the job wonderfully once it is learned. Of course, you'll mash your thumb a few times on the way. Here's another newsflash: You've had years to forget how much it hurt when you first started using it. Don't bs me otherwise. I cut my PC teeth on 3.1 and have cursed at every version up to and including XP.
Linux doesn't sound like a problem here. Quit believing hype and maybe you'll have better new product experiences.
Incidentally, Slashdot is not a monolith. We have 15 year old young minds who think every piece of OSS software is GPLed and anyone who makes money with it is a thief as well as 15 year old Young Republicans who think OSS is communism. I'm sure others can think of even more savory types who hang out here. Remember, the IQ of a mob equals the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the size of the mob. It's pretty useless to give it advice.
A number of games run under Linux.. linuxgames.com talks about some of them, and more can be found with a simple google search.
As for "tasks", I've found that my mother can make much better use of Redhat Linux 8.0 than she can of WinXP. Supporting it for her is easier as well--"Hi mom, turned SSH on for me? Great--remember that green piece of paper with instructions on how to give me your IP?" For her limited word processing needs (She writes a weekly article for a local newspaper), there's Abiword and openoffice. For email there's Kmail or Evolution, or any other number of excellent email applications. There's free solitaire games that she loves, etc. Windows--to get the same functionality for this woman--I'd have to pay quite a bit more. I'd have to purchase Microsoft Word and pay for a LOT of features that she can't use, Outlook--again the same, and download a number of buggy shareware games that would likely cause issues for her down the line.
It's not the "casual home user" that is tied to Windows. It's the office user whose environment requires MS-Office ONLY features that have not yet been implemented in the OSS solutions available on Linux. It's the user that has specific requirements as far as software, which in turn has specific requirements in therms of OS.
For the casual home user, or even for the middle-of-the-line home user, Linux is *wonderful*. For the advanced user? More of the same.
-Sara
windows IS completely scriptable.
Isn't this one of the main reasons Windows is such a problem on both the desktop and in the server arena?
Not just the scriptability (Mac OS X goes a long ways in this regard) but the looseness of the implementation, which is the big reason admins stay so busy patching, etc.
what it really comes down to is a CLI and a good scripting language. Now windows machines claim to have a scripting language but to use it effectively you have to go through a GUI not a CLI thus network admin of unix machines is not for the faint of heart. This situation gets worse when you start trying to configure services (web servers, etc...) that also have GUI interfaces rather than text configureation scripts.
On the otherhand admin of linux across a net is pretty darn easy. When you start getting into having your main disks not be the local disks life gets even simpler in Linux.
On the otherhand, I suspect that the better a desktop machine becomes the more GUI administration is going to be important on linux. Consequently it may lose some advantages in fleets of desktops.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Oen thing to note: the "less staff required" can often count against things in "managerial empire-building with lots of petty political power struggles" environments, which are unfortunately very common. Telling a manager "you'll need less staff" is not necessarily the best route to his heart, they might even take it as a threat.
No, that's not a healthy corporate culture. But in big companies and semi-states (a mainly european phenomenon where state-owned companies kinda-sorta privatise), it is a common one.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
The same thing with Mac users moving to Windows, and Windows users moving to the Mac, and Linux users moving to either platform--There are things that the new platform does not have, things that work exactly the same, and things that the new platform has that the old one doesn't. The trick is using the platform long enough to discover the workflow, and realize "Hey, this is really good for..." and "Hm. This isn't that great for .. and .., but I can make it work by doing a, b, and c."
Any company that moves to a new platform just because of hype is looking for a major disappointment, because NO platform today can live up to the hype of its supporters. First-time Windows users will find the Luna interface to be scary, certain things to be counter-intuitive, etc. First time Mac users will pull out their hair over certain permission-schemes, their eyes will ache from the animation and oversaturated bright colors and whites, etc. First time Linux users will type in "dir" and be totally confused as to why it doesn't behave like DOS.
After a while, any of these complaints go away--and the view of the OS becomes more practical. "Does it do what I need it to do?" "Does it work the way I need it to work?" "I know it's not the BEST in every area, but is it the BEST in the areas I require excellence in the most?"
Hype is a good thing and a bad thing. It gets the ball rolling, but it also encourages disappointment in those who absorb hype as 100% truths. Those who don't accept hype as an absolute truth, however, still exist--and they come over with realistic expectations and find many exciting things that exist on their new platform that they could only imagine on their old one.
A smart man will be a smart man, and a foolish one will be a foolish one. Guess which one will be disappointed. And guess which one the Linux community doesn't really want in the first place, no matter HOW nice it would be to have championed the Number-One OS of the future.
-Sara
And this is why windows admins don't understand how Linux admins manage that many machines. VNC is a bad hack that you'd only use if you needed cross platform remote display. You do realize that if you really needed to remotely run graphical apps, X programs are inherrently remote displayable. Not only that, but the power of linux administration is the fact that you *never* need to run a graphical program. If I have a farm of 150 web servers, I can make an httpd.conf on one of them and with a 3 line shell script (typed interactively on the command line) scp it to every machine on the network and restart those webservers. Or I could tie it to a cron job, or a script monitoring /var/log/messages for a certain event like a service going down, or have procmail do it when it recieves an email. Yes I know with the right packages and third party tools windows is scriptable as well, but its not designed around scriptability. The simplest way to permanently change the host name of a machine is still to go in with vnc (or terminal services, I have to be fair) and open up the network configuration dialog and change it. Which is easy, I admit. But over a slow network its infuriating. I can ssh in from a modem and edit /etc/sysconfig/network with vi and it'd be just as responsive as if I was on the local network. Again, I see the benefit of both approaches, but never would I personally want to administer a significantly large windows data center when a unix based solution was feasable.
Yes, pointless. The article is discussing the TCO of Linux vs. Windows (vs. Solaris) in a specific sort of web serving environment. The guy was claiming that he was unconvinced by the argument, which shows only that he didn't understand the scope of the argument. In short, he's not responding to the article, but to the somewhat misleading story title.
If you cannot run Lightwave on anything other than Windows, then Windows has the lowest TCO for that application. I get that. My advice still stands: Read the articles before posting. It's hard to hold a useful discussion when clueless folk who see "TCO" in the posting, and decide they already know both what the story will say and what their opinion is.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Replace Lightwave with.. oh.. any game ever made
;-)
;-)
Well, we were talking about costs in businesses here, so availability of games is hardly an issue, since the number one games played in offices (minesweeper, solitaire and freecell) come with any standard Linux install...
But seriously:
Windows has the best variety of mission critical apps out there
This is a nice broad statement, but it very much depends on what your mission is, wouldn't you agree? If you're for example in the business of developing Java-based software, Linux workstations are most certainly a nice cheap alternative. If your mission is education, the same thing may apply.
And please don't give me the "it will take ages to convert the users" story... as long as the sysadmins know what they are doing, anybody familiar with Windows can learn KDE in an afternoon... it took my girlfriend about an hour...
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
"Always in motion is the future" said Yoda. Decisions need to be "future-proofed". That needs flexibility. If you have room to manouver then you can react to the unexpected. Open source gives you that room to manouver.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
This is all fine and dandy but money isn't the object. It's about what you want to do and how you want to do it. If *nix does what you want and Windows doesn't then the choice is made for you. If they both do what you want but your people are more comfortable doing it in Windows then that's what you go with.
I'm not saying that money isn't a factor at all. Sure it is. But if money was the main factor in the decision for a company, and I were a stockholder in that company, I would be very concerned. If they were switching from Windows to *nix based on cost, I would have to wonder if their eye was really on the end goal.
In my case I operate a public safety system, a 911 dispatch center. Our radio consoles and recording system all use Windows NT and 2K. We KNOW it would be cheaper to use *nix. We KNOW the system would be more reliable. Our CAD system runs AIX and sets a great example to prove the point. All that doesn't matter one single bit. Why? First off it's propriatary equipment and only runs on Windows so we cant change it. Second we couldn't justify the down time for the change and operator training.
It's not about price or TCO. If that's what starts to drive the *nix community then they will lose big time. Focus on doing a job, doing it well, and making it a pleasure to do the job. That will win customers/users in the end, not price.
This comming from a man know by family and friends as a tightwad.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
in many organizations, especially government, lower expenditures are bad. my guess is that this holds true for many private corps too. i'm a teacher. every year my school is alotted X number of dollars for service Y. guess what happens at the end of the year to all unspent dollars. it goes back to the district. and next year, we get 95% X to spend. it is in our "best interest" to spend it all, and then some. in fact, our prinicpal has her dept. chairs come up with last minute lists months in advance, so that she can spend it before we lose it. does this suck? completely. so, anything that lowers costs will be looked upon as bad.
our district is a novell network. i have heard novell is a pretty good choice, but apparently, they screwed the pooch pretty badly. our win98 clients run dog slow, and need tons of maintenance. we have many problems, alot that just linger. so what do they do, hire technicians for every school. but guess what, ditrict level tech dept. gets bigger budget, tech admin has more stroke. you think he cares? no. he has no concern for costs. we have literally hundreds of old P120/32MB boxes, many purchased just to qualify for technology funds from the state. (don't get me started on that one!!)
i proposed turning some into X clients. hell, all the kids do is access internet type a paper or two. maybe put together a powerpoint show ( i teach 7th grade). of course the boxes go totally unused. in fact, 20 take up an entire lab. a complete f***in waste. i spoke to the district tech admin, showed him all that it can do, running X remotely from my classroom no less. he was shocked all i needed was $3K for a dual xeon server. he said no, primarily because he wouldn't control it. we would spend school funds, and we'd run it.
remember, that tco doesn't matter if you're not spending your money, and you have to spend it all.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Whereas you indeed made several good points, there are some in which certain amendments might be in place.
Remote Administration. Linux? X11 or VNC.
Who in their right minds would ever do *nix remote administration on graphic UI? In an environment like this, you have a separate test box with which you figure out and test all the things that need to be done. (Nobody rolls, neither in nor out, any modifications without first testing them.) Then you write a shell-script to accomplish this and put it up on a network-shared resource. As an admin, you have access to uid(0) account (possibly other than root) on every box. In a simple command, you cycle through all *nix boxes and set the box to execute the shellscript on a given time. You only give the authentication passphrase to your admin key once, and ssh-agent authenticates you to every box without further intervention. All *nix boxes upgrade to new, tested setups automatically at specified time. How do you accomplish this in a w32 network? And who would even need movies and/or multimedia for remote administration duties?
Automatic Updates & Patching.
I know personally people who maintain large corporate and university networks. They have a "local master" server that they use to mirror the updates. Once the updated packages are set on this box, all the client boxes are, again with short shellscripts or with automatic and timed events, set to fetch these packages and update to proper versions. Again, in an environment like you describe, no sane admin would ever allow machines to upgrade to untested versions. Automatic updates, directly from vendor's site would be a Really Bad Idea.
And by the way, the only linux distribution that requires constant recompiling, is gentoo. But that is not meant for enterprise desktops but for individual power users' home boxes. There really are things like dependency-tracking and binary packages for linux. (Debian and apt-get spring first to mind...) I would suggest you do your homework a little better.
The primary goal is not to individually administer all of the boxes, but set up batch jobs that do all the magic. Remote GUI may be nice when playing helpdesk but for real large-scale administration one should not even think about doing repetitive tasks over a remote display.
For the record, I find the study hazy and preposterous as well. It provides no solid figures, only some executive summary numbers. However, I hereby tip my hat to you. You made a worthy post with several VERY good points and aspects people either overlook or forget.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
Windows administration is enormously labor intensive, even if you set up everything the way Microsoft recommends you do. Windows administration (and Windows programming, for that matter) reminds me of the recent thread on games Everquest and the Virtual Skinner Box: you get the feeling that Windows tools are structured to dole out rewards to keep you playing, even if your skill level is pretty low. It's no accident that so many dialog boxes say things like "Congratulations, you have just..."; some accomplishment--to stick a CD in the drive and enter a serial number. The goal, after all, is to keep people buying and recommending your product; if it doesn't work effectively for them, that's OK as long as the customers don't notice and feel good about it.
As a result, "certified" Windows sys admins feel really good about what they are doing--they get a sense of accomplishment. But a skilled UNIX or Linux sys admin can often accomplish with a couple of commands in seconds what it takes the Windows admins hours to do.
Unlike Windows, Linux won't try to make you feel good or give you a pleasant user experience. It won't encourage you or compliment you. It's just a professional tool, and at that it's quite effective. What it will let you do is, given the same workload, spend more time on the beach (or posting on Slashdot, as the case may be :-).
seem to ignore the costs of upgrading. They always assume that you buy your fixed number of computers and then operate them for a fixed task over a period of time. They never seem to take into account that later on you may want to add more capacity to your computer system. Or you may be forced into upgrading your software, which may require new hardware or OS.
; en-us;LifeWin
For example:
If for instance if your deploying any machines with Windows 2000 Server/Professional now, then you will only have two years and three months of mainstream support. What happens if there's a critical exploit discovered (or released) one week after that ? Tough, you should have upgraded your OS by now.
Or how about if you developed and deployed an online conferencing systems with Windows Media encoder 7.1 just a year ago ? Well unless you want to be using unsupported software, your going to have to upgrade the software you developed to Windows Media Encoder 9 before the end of this year.
And even if it's acceptable to your company to run unsupported software, it's going to become harder and harder to find legitimater copies of the software you need. For example Office 97 would suffice for my word processing needs, but Microsoft have stopped selling it, and most of the copies on sale now are illegitimate. How much would a Microsoft inspection cost your company ?
Btw support lifetimes here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
IMHO, where the story submitter says "This not because it is free", it should read "This not only because it is free". Being free as in beer helps reducing costs you know (not to mention being free as in libre). Licensing costs do matter.
Taking that TCO stands for "Total Cost of OWNERSHIP" then this cant be applicable to windows, since you dont actually own a copy of windows that you buy, you merely have a revokeable license to use it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I know, flamebait, but I'll bite.
OpenLDAP with SSL works fine in my experience, never had a headache from setup to implementation. Active Directory does indeed work out of the box. But when third party tools need to interact with it or you need some schema changes, things can go to hell in a handbasket quickly.
Your argument about client policy management is referring to Windows client policy management. I will give that Windows is superior to Linux at distributing policies to clients, but we are talking about Linux across the board. You have a lot more power across the board when you don't have to rely on samba to accomplish things. Also, with NT4 clients (which is often unavoidable in Windows networks on a budget), Samba actually offers a bit more power and flexibilty when dealing with those 'legacy' clients.
Remote software installation better on Windows? You have got to be kidding. Some applications do work fine for doing convenient remote applications. Sometimes Terminal Services is required. I have seen apps that will only successfully install from the console (or, by extension VNC).
I'll admit the MMC is a decent remote administration tool, but I would not give it as much credit to say it is good at managing multiple systems at once. I haven't really seen anything under windows that is any better than anything under linux as far as managing groups of computers at once.
Remote administration under Windows is much more of a pain than any *nix. Almost anything can be done through ssh and the system doesn't care. For gui, all X11 windows are created equal, whether local or remote. X11 is a bit talky in terms of bandwidth, but it is rarely needed. Windows administration first off requires GUI to be forwarded. Second off, Remote Desktop frequently behaves differently from the console, making VNC a requisite practically for those apps that break in RDP world. Why the hell VNC would be needed for much in Linux is beyond me. I rarely have to use X11 even.
And to say Windows 2000 is kerberos with no dicking around is a travesty. Have you ever tried to use the built-in facilities for anything other than Windows clients, or try to get Windows clients to authenticate against an alternative LDAP/Kerberos implementation? They bastardized kerberos just enough to make it desirable to be an all-ms shop. That is their business, making non-ms interoperating with MS too clunky to try. For an all Windows network it is fine, but in that case it might as well be something proprietary, so kerberos is just a buzz word hinting at interoperability that just isn't there.
You seem to have been comparing built in facilities to third party applications when oit comes to Enterprise monitoring. I haven't really bothered to try many third party products when it comes to this area, and I'm not sure what *exactly* you mean by enterprise monitoring specifically, so I'll leave this alone.
And finally, with regards to automatic updating. No sane administrator trying to maintain a consistant environment blindly runs auto-update. One, you test out patches before giving the big ok to mass deployment. For another, Windows updates requires reboots 99% of the time for update package installation. That really makes reliabily sink. If you are really crazy enough to do auto-updates and trust parties outside your organization, you can easily use up2date automatically or apt as a massive cron job.
My final point is that clearly you are a relatively seasoned Windows administrator. I have been in that role too. Both times they let me go in favor of a cheaper administration who was 'good enough'. These replacements often have no idea how to fully exploit the features available in Windows. When talking with them, they never know that AD is an LDAP system, or even what Kerberos is. The only thing they ever do is vnc (yes *vnc in*) to the domain controller to modify user accounts not realizing the power of mmc to make it easier. That is the extent to which they interact with AD. These are the people who cannot by themselves efficiently manage larger networks.
And it is becoming increasingly hard for businesses to tell the good from the bad. The market is so saturated of people who were pretty decent and jumped at the 'get your MCSE with us' commercials, that finding good administration is hard. Linux scares these people by and large, so the market of Linux administrators is a lot more pure. If and when RHCE becomes 'hot' like mcse, you'll see a lot more junk Linux admins too...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have just finished deploying twenty old (P133-300) computers in five locations for my current client. They all run Linux off of cds, with no hard drives. To upgrade, I send them a new cd. They never shut them off and haven't had a (software related) problem yet.
Someone else mentioned LTSP+Mosix. All of you Windows noobs should take a serious look at this project, and re-evaluate some of your prejudices about how to configure and administer a network of "desktops". The absurd amount of computing resources that an all-M$ setup requires (1ghz desktops, servers in every physical location, etc..) can be put to much better use just by expanding your OS horizons a little and giving Linux a chance.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'm a (primarily) Windows admin. I do agree that if you have an average guy, he'll be able to deal with fewer machines than your avg Linux admin. But the whole thing is scripting. Although I would NEVER want to deal with multiple hundreds of Windows machines by myself (which I know some Unix admins do), several dozen are easily managable.
Windows can be scripted to an extent, while less malleable than Linux, you can still automate a lot of tasks. Is Jonny MCSE gonna do this? No. Neither is some dork who bought a book and got an RHCE.
In the right environment, either system is easily managed and scripted (and even stable). But the number of "Windows Admins" drives down the price of us, therefore we have more men per machine.
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